Orange County Register’s Presses Hum with Optimism

The Orange Country Register in suburban Los Angeles is expanding its newsroom. Not only that—the owners are emphasizing print, not digital. In the past few weeks, longtime Register editor Ken Brusic has hired some two-dozen positions. “We haven’t seen this kind of hiring since the early ’90s,” he says.

At the Register’s headquarters, it sounds like a different era. The Register’s presses whir nearly 24 hours a day. They’re printing more color, more pages.

Brusic doesn’t think people stopped subscribing to newspapers because they didn’t want to read them. He thinks it’s because publishers made too many cutbacks.